XFree, DRI, distro and a bunch of stuff..

Hi all

First i am glad to see a very good activity on the linux forum despite the 'times' we are living. Second here folows an update on my experimentations. Please please comment as i NEED feedback from other sager linux users and if they are running in the same issues that i am.

Opensource, communication, exchange for better knowledge, overall and in depth.

Anyhow, First let me comment a bit on the recent evenements in XFree86 devel mailing lists. I am still mad at the fact that :

1) It has now been revealed that ATI has been providing patches to the xfree source tree as soon as their hardware got released. They know the linux market is turning towards ATI as nvidia still uses prop code.

2) This just plain slackiness as the current DRI loads only an ATI 7500 microcode as our ATI M9 have higher potential. The hydravision and all on chip ati video accelerations are not being exploited at the moment.

3) The BOD ( Board of Developpers ) of XFree86 is just a very closed area, and a fork of the project has been 'anticipated' by one of the key developper, who says he is not impress with the current stage of work.

4) Ridiculous for us end user as the opensource community is shooting themselves in the feet. What will happen if ATI get discouraged providing patches that never get commited to the source code ? Um, yeah that might be why they already ship binaries.

So it means that to trully EXPLOIT all of our card possibilities, we are stuck up at the moment waiting for ati to realease new drivers for X 4.3.0.

Anyhow, here are a few accelerations tricks of your DRI ( i consider that you are using the DRI and the radeon 1.7.0 kernel module that you compiled and moved to the right module directory of your kernel ). First the config :

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI 9000 Mobility"
Driver "radeon"
# VideoRam 65536
BusID "PCI:1:00:0"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "CloneDisplay" "0"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
# Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"
# Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
EndSection

So as you can see, VideoRam is commented cause it gets autodetected.
BusID line will speed up X starting as it doesn't have to probe it.
AGPMode needs forced to '4' or it will default to 1.
CloneDisplay as well, if you are not using TV out, to speed up the X launch.

Option "EnablePageFlip" "on" will really speed you up too

# Option "AGPFastWrite" "on" This will be lovely, but on my 5660, it just corrupts the Display, the config file and freezes, just have to hard reboot. Please someone tell me why.

Then second, to really speed things again, when you compile the radeon module as in the http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/DRIcompile.html

Just compile it with :
# make CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse" -f Makefile.linux

Yes this will enable the pentium4 extensions and use sse and sse2 instaed of the classic mmx instructions, understating that the gcc version you are using is at least 3.2.X ( type gcc -v in aterm to find out ).

I got real improvements with it.

Now i am running a 2.4.21-pre5-ac3 kernel and have been really happy has the new A.C. Sheduler has taken a lot of my overhead/latency on the IDE subsystem and I/O are much better.
ACPI is nearly top notch but the latest pacth 2.4.21-pre5 diff was runnign but buggy for me. I reverted to 2.4.21-pre4 acpi patches.

Well, please comment, hope i could get my hand on these ati patches and recompile X, i could then give X as a binary.
Till soon.

winex

Hey

I have been on lots of linux chats on irc and it is a general problem. Winex will not run if ya have too recent glibc even 3.

By the way. AGPFastwrites works ?
Whats your glx gears score ? Tweak tweak tweak .....

q3 sucks ?

Umm define suxs ?
Cause yeah yeah, we are far from the ATI binary drivers performance, but the DRI is far acceptable. I get 2089 av fps in glxgears untouched unresized, and quake 3 runs at 1154x864 at 40/60 FPS av with 90/100 peaks.

But not FULL SCREENED. Try window ing it. ))
much better no ? I have this FPS at max textures, max settings, Trilinear 32 bits.
Let me know....

DRI

The DRI from sourceforge on the site is an old version. You get the newer radeon kernel modules and other DRI with XFree 4.3.0.

Hope that answers it.